


terms and conditions

by deniigiq



Series: Selkie Verse [2]
Category: Daredevil (TV), Deadpool - All Media Types, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies), Spider-Man - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magic, Contracts, Familiars, Gen, Karen wanting to be a selkie with her whole heart, M/M, NOT OMEGAVERSE, Selkies, Spells & Enchantments, Team Bonding, Team Red, Team as Family, Witchcraft, Witches, matt and foggy having feelings and being assholes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-30
Updated: 2019-11-30
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:35:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21618472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deniigiq/pseuds/deniigiq
Summary: “Peter,” Foggy eventually said, “Not all witches have familiars. There’s no predicting when you get them anyways, so there’s no—”“Should I scry?” Peter asked him. “I know you’re not supposed to, but what if there’s something wrong?”(Peter hasn't found his familiar and he's been a witch-in-training for years now. He ends up giving his heart to a fire demon, which causes much controversy among his selkie friends.)AKA, a Howl's Moving Castle/Kiki's Delivery Service/Song of the Sea AU
Relationships: Jonathan "Jack" Murdock/Margaret Murdock, Matt Murdock & Franklin "Foggy" Nelson, Matt Murdock & Franklin "Foggy" Nelson & Karen Page, Matt Murdock & Peter Parker & Wade Wilson, Matt Murdock/Franklin "Foggy" Nelson, Peter Parker & Johnny Storm
Series: Selkie Verse [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1558045
Comments: 22
Kudos: 412





	terms and conditions

**Author's Note:**

> this is beyond self-indulgent but I don't even care anymore. It's just merging all my favorite witch/magic media together. 
> 
> If you haven't read **whispering seas** I really recommend doing that. While it is mostly a piece about Matt and Foggy as kids, the last chapter brings us forward to this place and this stuff is gonna sound nuts to you if you don't have that background. But if being confused is your idea of a good time, then my friend, you absolutely do you. Have at it.

Matt was late coming into the office because he’d been out trying to catch a fish. Foggy could smell it on him. Karen could tell from the fish in his hands.

“Please tell me you took that on the train,” she said.

Matt ignored her to make imploring eyes over Foggy’s shoulder.

Foggy didn’t like them one bit.

“An offering?” Matt said, holding the fish his way sheepishly.

“What do you want?” Foggy asked uneasily.

“To give you an offering?”

Bullshit.

“You already gave me one,” Foggy said. The fish Matt offered him now was of the fluke variety. The fish Matt had brought him on Monday had been a by-far more hideous flounder. Foggy had spent the whole Sunday before chasing Matt away from the water and so he had received this forbidden flounder with maybe just a smidge of irritation.

Maybe he should have pretended to be happier. Maybe this was a do-over offering on Matt’s part.

“You’re dismissing it?” Matt asked him, heartbroken.

Are you serious?

Foggy sighed then took the fish into custody.

“No, it’s been received,” he said. The little bump of energy that came with every offering soared through his shoulders. Matt beamed at him.

“Where am I supposed to put this, Matthew?” Foggy groaned.

“I’ll take it,” Karen said.

No. Karen was a pack-rat and a chronic desk-stuffer. If Karen so much as touched this fish, it was condemned to be used for evil.

“I can run it home?” Matt offered.

Foggy evaluated him. This was suspiciously polite behavior. Matt’s usual submission was hard-won and came as a package with whining.

There was no whining present.

“Did your dad yell at you again?” Foggy asked.

“No,” Matt said. “Here, gimme. I’ll put it in your fridge.”

“Your mum?”

“Foggy, give it.”

“Was it Jess?”

“Dude. No one yelled at me.”

“Then what is this, Matthew? What do you want with me?”

Matt took the fish back and cradled it handsomely.

“Well, if you must know,” he said. “I have a bit of a situation which could use a man with a coat.”

Ahhhhh.

Alright, here we go.

Peter had feelings. More feelings than anyone his size should be allowed to have and Foggy could only sit there with MJ and Ned while he paced about and had them.

Peter was a witch--a trainee--but still a witch. He was unusual in this for many reasons, not the least of which was that he was a Spiderkid. Foggy had yet to meet any witches as young as Peter in the city. He’d met a bevy of trainees in their twenties just getting started, but Peter was much younger than them and had been a trainee since he was twelve, which was, as far as Foggy was concerned, much more in line with traditional craft practices and really, the proper way to go about things.

Unfortunately for Pete, his on-the-ball auntie had taught him about familiars and he’d just noticed that all those twenty-something gals waltzing around the city had their charmed teacup poodles and cats and ravens waltzing around with them, while he, who had been training for _years_ longer, had still yet to form a bond with any such animal.

He was worrying himself into a whirlpool over it.

Matt didn’t know how to help him. Matt was, in fact, the type of creature which might become a familiar, if it weren’t for his lack of coat and Foggy. And Matt was _not_ fucking down. He refused to live his life with his heart all tied up with Spiderkid’s. The mere idea made him uncomfortable.

So naturally, he’d gone and found Foggy to deal with this for him.

“Peter,” Foggy eventually said, “Not all witches have familiars. There’s no predicting when you get them anyways, so there’s no—”

“Should I scry?” Peter asked him. “I know you’re not supposed to, but what if there’s something wrong?”

Peter’s friends mumbled to each other, trying to figure out what the fuck scrying was. Foggy sighed.

“No scrying,” he said. “Be patient.”

“I think I should scry,” Peter decided. “I need a ball. Or a mirror. A mirror is easier.”

His aunt would lose her shit if she knew.

“Kiddo,” Foggy warned.

“Okay, you’re right, that’s too intrusive. Maybe some water. That’s like, barely scrying.”

Exhausting. No wonder Matt had bailed.

“Scrying is scrying is scrying,” Foggy said. “And that’s all bad luck, you know that.”

“It doesn’t matter. I don’t have luck,” Peter told him. “I was born without it—here, see? My mom gave me this before she went away. It’s ‘cause she and my dad were dumb and promised their first born back when they thought they weren’t gonna have kids.”

Foggy blinked in surprise at the amulet bound in leather to Peter’s wrist.

A witch with no luck?

…maybe a little scrying couldn’t hurt after all.

No, no. Tamp that down, Nelson. Keep that gab of yours zipped up tight. Scrying was only to be done on others’ behalf. Reading your own future brought it closer and closer. Peter was still a baby and a stupid one, unfortunately. If he got ahold of a mirror or something, his future might snap into fast-forward. If he had no luck, then it _definitely_ would.

Surely there was a safer way to do this.

Foggy’s first thought was to send Peter to visit an aged witch, but that was easier said than done. The real witches of this godforsaken city were all mixed in with the bullshit fortune tellers and seers and crock-of-shit millennial homeopathy garbage.

Peter lamented this, too.

“May used to take me to see Mrs. Wilkins, but she died and her daughter thinks witchcraft is cupping and Himalayan salt lamps,” he pouted.

Hm.

Well.

“I’ll ask around,” Foggy told him. “People might be more open to talking with me than with you.”

Foggy was becoming established in these parts. The _fae_ were starting to know his name. And most (bar Jessica) were started to develop something like respect for him.

“Thank you,” Peter said.

Matt didn’t fuck with witches as much as he could help it. It was the Catholic in him, Foggy suspected. He was chill with pretty much everything else, but apparently there always had to be a line in the sand somewhere.

What that meant practically was that Foggy was kind of stuck because he needed a human companion for a witch to not see him as a threat. Matt wasn’t coming, and even then, Matt was human-adjacent. He was still half-selkie. He was just a half-selkie with a thick skull, bad-decision making prowess, and no coat. Foggy wasn’t positive that an aged witch would consider him human enough to be trusted anyways.

Karen volunteered enthusiastically.

Foggy sighed.

Karen had been reading books—trash--she’d been reading trash.

Legendary trash and trash of the finest quality, there was no disputing that, but still trash.

She kept coming up with weirdass facts about the _fae_ that made fuck all sense. She wrenched her head from a grimoire the next day and came scrambling out into the reception area to accuse Matt and Foggy of being anomalies of their people.

Selkies, she claimed, were mostly women.

Matt startled cackling, but Foggy tried to be more delicate as he explained to Karen that when a mama selkie and a papa selkie _really_ love each other—

She hit him with the grimoire. She then went on to decide that human + selkie = selkie, and selkie + selkie = seal. This meant, in her head, that half-selkie + half-selkie had a 25% chance of resulting in a human, a 25% chance of resulting in a seal, and a 50% chance of resulting in a half-selkie, which was a load of shite on every possible plane.

Foggy introduced his sister into the arena.

Candace was not completely human. She was human, but she was more like Peter, blessed with the Sight and Sense. She swam with seals. She felt with seals. The human offspring of two half-selkies or hell, a human and a selkie, would never be human the way that Karen was thinking.

“It’s a spectrum,” he tried to explain to her.

She wasn’t having it.

Foggy introduced himself into the mix. His dad was a half-selkie. His biological mom was a full selkie. He, however, was considered a full selkie because his humanity was almost negligible, despite having all the right genes for it.

“Sometimes, it just doesn’t happen. Sometimes a strong selkie and a normal human end up with a barely-selkie child. Sometimes a weak selkie and a strong human end up with a super-selkie child. It all depends on the role the spirits of the sea need the child to take on. This is why it is a spectrum,” he tried to explain while Karen struggled to process this.

She then flailed at Matt, demanding an explanation of his existence. He flailed back rather than answering, which was fair.

Matt was a funny case because his mum was an absurdly strong selkie who brazenly refused to fill the role the spirits had sought her to fill. After throwing that shit in their faces the whole of her youth by becoming a selkie of the mountains rather than one of the sea, she’d held two fingers up to the island as a whole before making her way to New York and falling in love with someone who Foggy was 80% sure was supposed to die young and unknown.

Somehow, her and Mr. Murdock’s meeting changed both of their fates.

Foggy thought that the sea spirits hadn’t been banking on Matty even happening, but they’d been optimistic and delighted when he had. Matt’s selkie presence was strong for a half-selkie. Really strong, strong enough to be chosen to lead everyone to the Other Place that one time back when he and Foggy were just eight years old. But unfortunately, the spirits found themselves again spurned when Matt, reliably unpredictable, had decided that nah, he was good. He wanted to be human, and so he’d let his coat wash out to sea and now ran around as an unlikely hero, just like his old man.

The sea spirits were very confused, very confused indeed.

Foggy could feel them when he and Matt went out to the beach and Matt came with him into the water.

The spirits wanted Matt back. They tried to wash him back at every possible opportunity, which was fun and not at all _really fucking dangerous, you assholes. Come on._

And so yes, while Karen was correct, there was one glaring anomaly in their workspace, it had nothing to do with Matt and Foggy being men and everything to do with Sister Maggie’s unrelenting and hereditary sense of free will.

Karen still could not understand. She could, however, understand the bit about Matt being violently stupid and uncontrollable and so left them back for her trash-books comforted by the confirmation of this information.

Matt decided then he wanted to go to the beach.

Karen reappeared to announce that she wanted to see him do battle with the waves.

Foggy sighed as hard as he could.

He was trying to find a witch, guys. A little help would be nice.

Sister Maggie was out on the coast when the Foggy unleashed Matt upon the water for Karen’s edification. Matt paused in his race to go crashing into it and abandoned Foggy and Karen to go rub cheeks with his mother. Karen was shocked to see Sister Maggie outside of her happy church home. Foggy was surprised to see Mr. Murdock out with her. He hadn’t realized that Mr. Murdock was solid enough these days to accompany Sister Maggie out of her warded space.

Mr. Murdock, of course, was happy to see Matt. He appeared to be bored right to hell with his mate’s patient resting as her land legs returned. He had dug a hole about two feet deep in the sand.

They must have been there a while.

Mr. Murdock was really getting a hang of this whole ‘moving objects’ thing. He was well on his way to being a poltergeist if he ever lost interest in digging holes. Foggy suspected that he wouldn’t, though, because Matt was way into holes, too. He got excited at the prospect of it happening right then and within moments Mr. Murdock was trying to get him to remember his fucking fingers were covered in very pierceable skin.

Sister Maggie let them natter away at each other.

Foggy intercepted Karen as she attempted to seize the moment of peace for offensive purposes.

“Sister, do you happen to know of any aged witches around here?” he asked her.

Sister Maggie didn’t stop watching her mate and pup make plans to increase the scale of their current excavation.

“There’s a woman on 16th and 46th who’s horrible,” she said. “Can’t tell if she’s the real thing or just bathes in herbs, though. Jack says she was there when he was a kid, so she’s certainly aged if nothing else.”

Mr. Murdock looked over at his name.

“Mrs. Tennison,” he said. “Or there’s that one woman, what’s her name, Grace? The one with the blue braids?”

“Too young,” Sister Maggie told him. She turned back to Foggy. “Dare I ask why?”

Sister Maggie didn’t like witches any more than Matt. She thought Peter should just wait.

“These things take time and he’s still young yet,” she said, now supervising Matt as he and Karen played a fun game called ‘Who Can Withstand this Freezing Water the Longest.’

“I’m kind of tempted to tell him it’s going to be a spider,” Foggy thought out loud, piling sand on to the middle of Matt’s abandoned stick.

Mr. Murdock thought he was funny at least. It was nice to be appreciated, even if it was by a ghost.

“Go on, then. Tell him; tell him you heard from a sea-witch that it was so,” Sister Maggie said. “It’ll keep him good and distracted until his real one comes along.”

That was certainly true.

“But what if it _is_ a spider?” Foggy pointed out. “He might kill it. Kid was born with no luck.”

He suddenly had Sister Maggie’s full attention.

“No luck?” she repeated.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“No luck??” she emphasized. “A witch with no luck?” She stared in wonder out to sea. “These people really need to stop offering their first-borns in their spells. It’s just cruel.”

Foggy could not agree more.

Foggy went out to sea after a while and then came back to shore to toss Matt back onto land. He went back out to sea and came back for a rousing repeat of this, which was fun mostly for Karen. It was less fun for Matt after the second time.

Eventually, Sister Maggie came over and settled in closer to the tide as a threat to the sea spirits. That gave Mr. Murdock plenty of distraction in terms of trying to escape sand crabs and allowed her to put off angry energy closer to the source of her irritation.

Karen gawked at Foggy and pointed when Matt was not swept out of the shallows by “fluke” waves anymore.

Foggy didn’t know what to tell her. The spirits were slightly afraid of their own creation when it came to Sister Maggie.

Before they left, Matt came over to rub cheeks with her one last time. She stuffed his cane in his hand, then told him that he was filthy and needed to comb Foggy’s hair for him.

Foggy told Peter that Monday that he’d spoken to an older and wiser selkie about his situation. He managed to keep himself looking sympathetic in the face of Peter’s obvious disappointment.

“It’s not worth the risk of scrying, buddy,” Foggy told him with a hand on his shoulder. “I know it’s a little scary not to know, but let yourself enjoy it. After your familiar turns up, you’ll have not a lick of privacy for the rest of your life.”

“I guess,” Peter sighed.

Foggy ruffled his hair.

“You can always pretend Wade’s your familiar,” he said. “Keep bringing him offerings of wet cat food and see what he does.”

That cheered Peter up marginally.

Foggy came back to the office and found Karen there wielding her damn grimoire again, this time pointing to an image of a selkie drawn in it.

The selkie had braids.

Foggy knew where this was going and he _hated_ it.

He’d hated braids as a pup and he hated braids now as a full-grown seal, but nothing brought Matt greater joy than sticking flowers and twigs and shit in his proper seal hair.

Karen was in awe of Foggy’s proper seal hair. She declared that she wanted to dye hers the same color.

“You’ll look like an old woman,” Foggy told her.

His natural mane was nearly white to match his natural skin. And while he didn’t love the ruddiness he forced into his face and the gold he wove into his hair in his public human form, he could admit that there was a warmth there that was often lacking from most selkies.

He missed Matt’s pup human form for this reason among many.

His hair had been so orange and his face sprayed in freckles. He’d always looked so much warmer than Foggy.

Matt told him to fuck off and stop telling people he used to be ginger.

Foggy leaned into it, naturally.

Karen begged him to wear the braids to work the next day, but that wasn’t fucking happening. Foggy had court. He was not wearing no ancient, Samhain braids to work. He was an adult, goddamnit, in the twenty-first century. He didn’t have to suffer this bullshit.

Karen had Matt do up some braids in selkie-style for her as a consolation prize. Matt was good at braiding, if less good at placing the traditional foliage. Foggy rolled his eyes at Karen’s sad face and, sighing, took up the task on Matt’s behalf.

“I am a selkie,” Karen told them both when her hair was done. “Behold my flowing, flowery locks. Fear me, for I eat fish bones. I have a billion layers of blubber so I don’t die of hypothermia in open water.”

And like.

She wasn’t _wrong_. Even if Matt was nearly wheezing through his laughing.

Karen had started planning a group trip to Ireland the following week when Peter came in to fetch MJ for shenanigans and Matt slammed his door open with enough force that Foggy jumped in his own office and came out to see what was the matter.

He found Matt looming over Peter in the waiting area while Peter refused to look him in the face.

Foggy’s heart sank.

“Pete, what did you do?” he asked.

“Nothin’,” Peter mumbled.

MJ was up in arms now in defense of her friend. Matt ignored her. His expression was murderous.

“Peter,” he threatened. “ _Peter_.”

Peter picked a new place to look that was still not Matt’s face.

“Peter Benjamin Parker,” Matt growled. “I know you did not do what I fucking think you did.”

Foggy realized abruptly that something smelt different in the room. Like a candle recently burnt out and throwing ribbons of smoke out around it.

They didn’t burn candles in the office and that smell hadn’t been there before.

Had Peter been messing around with smoke again? Experimenting, perhaps? That wasn’t unusual, Peter often came to pick up MJ smelling of six thousand different chemical tangs. Foggy was used to his occasionally clinical scents.

“Matt, lay off,” Foggy ordered.

Matt did not. That was a bad sign.

“Maidiú,” Foggy said firmly.

Matt bared his teeth Foggy’s way for invoking his name in front of these humans. Foggy bared his teeth back. Matt wouldn’t see it, but he could hear the click of Foggy’s incisors and he would hear the growl low in Foggy’s throat that came with their presence.

The standoff held. Foggy heard someone make a noise. Matt finally stepped back. Foggy dropped his shoulders.

“You frighten the pups,” he hissed at Matt.

“Good,” Matt snapped back at him. “Sometimes they need to be frightened.”

They would discuss this later, Foggy decided. He dropped his gaze back to the kids and finally noticed Karen pointing jerkily to her face in the corner of his eye.

He blinked and then touched the place under his eye. It felt normal.

“Spots?” Karen finally said.

Oh. Whoops.

Foggy couldn’t help it; he had a couple spots on his coat. They liked to manifest in his human forms as dark freckles and in that fun space mid-shift, he was told that they tended to bloom out on the right side of his face. Matt, of course, had never noticed them and Foggy hadn’t really been around humans he felt comfortable enough to half-shift in front of. He remembered once when he’d accidentally done it while play-fighting with Matt as a kid and Mr. Murdock had scrubbed his face raw, trying to get the ‘dirt’ off of it.

Not fun, not fun. A lesson in human cleanliness concepts was had by all.

The kids were now a little spooked.

Foggy swept his hair back and breathed deep until it settled back into its straw color and the specks on his face sized down to more human-appropriate freckles.

Matt stayed irritable on the other side of the office. He kept distance between himself and Peter, out of respect for Foggy’s request, but he obviously didn’t love it.

“Aye me,” Foggy sighed. “Apologies. That hasn’t happened in ages.”

The humans were quiet before Peter burst out, “That was _amazing_ , Fogs!”

Very sweet. He was very sweet.

Matt scowled.

“Maidiú?” MJ asked him.

He hissed at her.

“None of that,” Foggy said firmly to MJ. “That’s between us. Very inappropriate for anyone else.”

She nodded.

“Peter,” Foggy said patiently once this silent apology had been extracted, “What have you done?”

This fucking kid.

This FUCKING kid.

Foggy forgave Matt for being furious.

Matt tapped his foot in agitation when Foggy took his ear away from Peter’s chest and leveled him with a look.

“I can explain?” Peter tried.

A fire demon.

“But he was so lonely, Foggy.”

A fire demon.

“And—and maybe I was a little lonely too.”

A _fire_ demon, child.

“Are you out of your mind?” Foggy demanded. “I told you to wait, Peter. I told you to be patient.”

“I did,” Peter said, looking away with a hand on his near-silent heart. It was warmer than it ought to be, but it didn’t pump the way it had before.

It wouldn’t. It belonged to a _fucking fire demon_ now. That damn parasite would pump it however it damn pleased, whenever it damn pleased, wherever it damn pleased.

Matt seethed.

“What is its name?” he demanded.

Peter didn’t want to say.

“Peter,” Foggy said. “What is its name? Where is it?”

Peter still didn’t want to say.

Oooooh. Foggy’s blood was boiling.

“You can’t just give your heart away, Peter,” he said. “If that fire goes out, you’re done. You need to go revoke your agreement.”

Peter clenched his fingers in his shirt.

“I won’t,” he said quietly.

Oh, Jesus. Not this.

“He’s my familiar.”

Bullshit. Just bullshit. This was how fire demons tricked people.

“He is,” Peter insisted in a small voice. “I can tell.”

Aigh.

“Don’t you dare bring him here,” Matt snarled. 

Peter dropped his eyes impossibly further.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know there was such a divide between your people. He came to me from the sky. I thought he was a star.”

Matt didn’t seem to know that he was growling. Foggy kind of didn’t want to point it out to him because that noise was the one that he was feeling deep down in his soul at the moment.

“What’s his name, Peter?” he asked one last time.

“Johnny.”

The only thing keeping Matt from dousing Johnny Storm with the nearest liquid-bearing object was Foggy’s hands dug deep into his shoulders to keep him as far away from the kid as possible.

Johnny beamed at them with the power of a thousand suns.

Foggy felt the urge to hiss.

“Wow,” Johnny said to Peter. “Daredevil’s a selkie!”

“Half,” Peter said quietly.

Johnny blinked in surprise.

“A half-selkie?” he asked. “You don’t feel like a half-selkie.”

Matt hissed at him for Foggy. It felt nicer than it should have.

“That’s Foggy you’re feeling,” Peter mumbled. “He’s a full selkie.”

Johnny cocked his head at Foggy slowly, then angled his body ever so slightly defensively.

Good.

Be afraid, little star.

“You two are bonded,” Johnny noted, still holding Foggy’s eye. Foggy was the real threat here. Matt made a lot of noise, but Foggy was the one with the coat and the approval of the spirits of the sea.

Foggy felt his canines wanting to shift.

Johnny took a full step back behind Peter.

“Guys, please,” Peter said. “He’s my friend, now.”

Mm.

We’ll see how long that lasts.

Peter’s little fire demon was very energetic and highly annoying. Matt and Foggy refused to be near either of them. It was the most polite thing they could manage at the moment. Foggy didn’t want to shift in front of humans and Matt couldn’t, but his body was sure as fuck trying.

It was a shitshow waiting to happen. So they found the farthest corner of the office and crammed themselves in there, mutually growling, while MJ and Karen watched on in amazement.

Peter tried to get his heart to take the enthusiasm down a notch.

“They’re my friends,” he told his demon. “So you need to respect their space.”

“I am,” Johnny said, still so fucking brightly. “I haven’t touched a thing! See?” He rapped a few fingers against the reception desk. “No scorching, not even a little.”

If that little shit scorched so much as the corner of a picture frame, that was it. Foggy was putting him out with the Sprite he still had on his desk from lunch.

“No scorching period, okay?” Peter said. “Calm down.”

“Sorry, sorry, I’m just excited,” Johnny said. “Daredevil’s a selkie! Can you believe it, Spidey?”

“He’s—I just told you this,” Peter lamented. “He’s half. And you said you’d be friendly.”

“I am being friendly,” Johnny said. “It’s them who aren’t being friendly.”

Bullshit, you fancy candle.

Matt and Foggy were the friendliest selkies in the goddamn city. And all they had most of the time to swim in was the Hudson river. That alone should have made them twisted, evil bastards.

“Peter, I don’t know if this is working,” Karen said diplomatically. “Why don’t you and Johnny go out for a bit so Matt and Foggy can stop, uh. Growling.”

They would never stop, now. Not as long as that damn light was around.

Peter sighed.

“You’re right,” he said. “Sorry, guys. I’ll—maybe when we’re a little more mixed together, it’ll be easier for you.”

Ahahaha.

No.

“Imma drown him,” Matt said the second the door was closed.

“Matt, no,” Karen said.

Foggy could not believe that Peter had gone out and found a fire demon and he further could not believe that that little shit was one of the Fantastic Four.

He could _not_.

Matt was about ready to riot.

Wade didn’t understand why his two little buddies were suddenly at war.

He came to Foggy with an uncharacteristically serious face and pleading hands.

“What. Is. _Happening_?” he asked slowly, so Foggy would understand both his confusion and frustration all at the same time.

Foggy struggled to find diplomatic words to explain.

“Peter has accepted a fire demon into his heart and Matt wants to go plunge it into the sea,” Foggy said.

The only upside to this whole situation, in his opinion, was that Matt was seriously, seriously considering asking the sea for his coat back.

This was optimal. Incredible. Perfect in every way. Everything else happening could fuck right off.

Wade blinked his suit eyes.

“What are you even talking about?” he said.

The room went practically silent and Foggy felt like someone had dumped a handful of snow down the back of his shirt.

Did Wade seriously not know? Had no one told Wade anything about the people he hung out with?

Foggy found Karen’s concerned eye across the room and she lifted her shoulders in an anxious shrug.

“Wade,” Foggy said. He cleared his throat, “What—er. Do you know what Peter is?”

Wade scoffed.

“Do I—what’s with all y’all and your ‘what people are’ schtick? Of course I know what he is. We’ve worked together for ages at this point, Nelson.”

…mmmmm. Foggy was getting big ‘no’ vibes here.

“Yes, but do you know what he _is_ , Wade? You know, what he really is?” Foggy nudged.

He got nothing.

Fuck.

“A witch?” Foggy tried delicately.

Still nothing.

“A, uh—”

“Nelson, I get that this is a fun fuckin’ joke for you people,” Wade said. “But I for one am _tired_. We have work to do. I have work to do and I need these two numbskulls to—”

“Wade, Peter’s a witch,” Foggy said. “For real, a witch.”

Wade tsked and shook his head.

“And Matt’s and I are, uh. Seal people?” Foggy tried. Some folks didn’t know what selkies were called in the states. He hoped that maybe things were different up in Canada, but he didn’t know Wade’s background here.

The silence he got in return for this explanation told him he’d lost that gamble.

“Do I look manic to you right now, Nelson?” Wade said. “Do I look like a fucking child?”

Scary.

“Wade,” he said calmly. “Why don’t you go and talk to Frank Castle about this? I think you two might have a similar language here.”

Because Frank had been resistant at first but had subsequently tried to bribe Matt with sardines. Obviously, Matt had been stoked about this before reeling himself in and proclaiming that he was a _reformed_ selkie, Francis. He didn’t eat raw fish willy-nilly anymore. That was a baby-Matt thing.

This was a lie. Matt could and did eat raw fish just fine. He just got indigestion from the bones and was more susceptible to parasites now.

Frank hadn’t really known what to believe, but he’d pressed forward and, after watching Matt chomp through a fish-spine with zero-effort or care had come to the conclusion that yeah. Okay. This really was happening.

He was Karen’s source of trash reading material.

Wade left in a huff, but Foggy had no doubts that he’d be back soon.

He was.

Only hours later.

“Give me Red or suffer the consequences,” he threatened.

Matt had a few human-selkie tricks. The one he liked to intimidate Frank with was munching on fish scales, but he also had another, much less fun one, which happened around the full moon or sometimes in the middle of the month and involved him losing his voice and getting super crampy and lethargic from not being able to shift.

He’d dealt with this to a degree long before he’d given up his coat. Unlike Foggy, who’d lived in a village with its own herd of seals, Matt had grown up in the city. He’d been born in the harbor. He’d had to hide his selkie-ness for ages and so he’d gone weeks at a time without shifting.

He didn’t talk about it, but Mr. Murdock’s constant fussing over him in his unhappy state spoke of a lot of childhood trauma over it.

When it happened these days, Matt curled up in Foggy’s coat with him for as long as he could before Foggy headed out to sea. Then Matt popped a couple pills and slept through most of the next day or so.

The pain was part of the sacrifice he’d made when he’d sunk his coat into the water for the last time.

This pain was proof more than anything of his being a selkie, but it was a pain that humans couldn’t understand very well.

So Matt preferred to munch on the fish scales when he had a point to prove.

Wade took this poorly, Matt said. But not as poorly as he had taken putting an ear to Peter’s heart and finding it boiling hot and beating too slowly to for Peter to be as alive as he was.

Wade claimed that he needed a couple days off to process.

Matt said that he’d specifically used the word ‘process.’

Foggy soon found himself met out by Coney Island by Wade scrunched up, staring down from the edge of the pier.

Foggy bobbed up and gave him a wave with a flipper.

“Fuck no,” he heard Wade hiss up there.

Foggy did a cute little twist for him, then ducked back under. He’d let Wade do things at his own pace.

The next evening, Matt was combing through Foggy’s hair when Wade crashed into the apartment with one of Frank’s godawful grimoires.

“Spidey’s gonna fuckin’ _die_ , Red,” he said in horror.

Matt carried on with his grooming.

“That’s what I said,” he said. “The real shame is that I have to kill him.”

Wade worked his way through that.

“Why?” he finally asked tightly.

Matt hummed and smoothed cold fingers against Foggy’s neck. It felt very nice.

“Red. Red, why do you have to kill him? He’s a baby. You can’t kill him.”

“Not him,” Matt said. “The demon has to go. His people are violent towards ours. They dry out pups that are left on land and get power from burning our bones and pelts. Unfortunately, Peter gave the demon his heart, so by proxy, I guess he’s gotta go too.”

Silence.

“What if,” Wade said pointedly, “Pete and this demon were somehow separated?”

“Each day they’re together, that gets harder,” Foggy noted through closed eyes.

“Right, but _what if_ ,” Wade emphasized.

“A demon contract is a powerful spell to have to break, Wade,” Foggy said. “If not done properly, Peter will die. This is why no one wanted him to do it to begin with. If the demon gets put out, he dies, if the spell isn’t properly broken, he dies. The lots aren’t in his favor which does, unfortunately, seem to be his fate. He doesn’t have any luck to help him through that.”

“Luck?” Wade asked.

“Luck,” Foggy confirmed for him. “Witches need luck. Peter’s parents cursed him to have none.”

“For fuck’s sake,” Wade swore.

Peter was now on a mission to reform his demon in one direction while Wade was now on a mission to separate them in the opposite direction and the fun part was that neither of them gave the other the chance to get a word in edgewise.

Wade was taking to the knowledge that he was literally surrounded by _fae_ more like Frank than Karen. Where Karen embraced the whole thing and wanted to know what it all felt like, Frank was looking up spells to ward all the _fae_ away from his door.

Wade had meltdown after meltdown upon being reintroduced to folks he thought he knew, but with different classifications hovering around them. Jess, for example, Wade had been absolutely positive was human.

Jess, however, was not human and she resented being called human and there were reasons that you didn’t fuck with pixies.

Wade could not understand why all his shit kept spontaneously breaking and, once explained to him that he’d insulted a pixie and no, this could not be fixed by a mere apology, he really started to panic.

“How the fuck did I insult her? I literally just said, ‘so you aren’t human, then?’” Wade said to Foggy with his head trapped between his hands.

“You need milk,” Foggy told him. “Cream, specifically. Raw is best. You know anyone with a cow?”

“Nelson. Nelson, I’m begging you. Just—just talk to me like a person. A _real_ person.”

Foggy blinked long and slow at Wade while standing among the rubble of all his shattered plates.

“Sorry, friend. I can only talk to you as a selkie,” he said. “I could do some barking if that would help. Would that help? Some folks find it soothing.”

Wade buried himself in his hands whispering, “Oh my god.”

Peter had taught Johnny how to not set paper on fire, and while that was indeed a great step in the right direction, Foggy still wasn’t sold. Matt either.

Matt sweetly offered Johnny a manila envelope while he was off his guard and the thing went up in flame in less than two seconds.

Matt let Foggy lay into Peter with a face of extreme judgement.

“We’re getting there,” Peter defended. “We’re, uh. Okay, maybe receipts next, then construction paper, and then maybe wood?”

Johnny didn’t understand why he was being asked to do this.

“I’m a fire demon,” he chattered, making circles around Peter the way Peter had once paced circles around everyone else. “I’m _supposed_ to burn things. I’m _made_ to burn things. I don’t understand.”

Foggy sighed. Peter sighed with him and sought him out with sad puppy eyes.

Foggy shook his head.

He didn’t know how to tame a fire demon. He’d only bumped into a couple and they’d been lighting buildings and whole villages on fire. Generally, the object here was to fight or avoid.

Matt wanted to do the former, Foggy wanted to do the latter. Hence why Matt and Johnny were no longer allowed to be left unattended in the same room.

Peter’s aunt May was a good witch. A respectable witch who made potions and elixirs and herb packs for her extended neighborhood. She was very good at it and she lamented the fact that after all that training, Peter had gone out and found the exact type of demon who could destroy their family’s herbal stock in the blink of an eye.

She was trying very hard to like Johnny, Foggy could see, but he could also see her internal screaming, which was highly validating.

“We are working with this as best as we can,” May told him while Peter let Johnny light all the candles in the house and revel in it. “Obviously, I should have known this would happen, but I didn’t. And really, compared to the others of his kind, Johnny is pretty tame.”

She wasn’t wrong.

Johnny didn’t purposefully light up homes and didn’t seem too inclined to linger in his fiery state. He also seemed very attached to Peter and not at all inclined to burn him—not even a lick of fiery affection. Instead, he liked to cuddle in close and rub cheeks with him, which made Peter laugh and push him away.

It would have been cute if he wasn’t, you know, one of the mortal enemies of Foggy’s herd.

“We can work with this,” May breathed out nice and slow. “But just in case we can’t, do you selkies have any containment spells?”

They did, but Johnny wasn’t going to like them.

Wade had decided to mount his offense against Johnny slowly and strategically. First, he determined, he needed to figure out how to increase Peter’s negligible luck. Then, with that buffer in place, he could start experimenting with wards and if that proved ineffective, he would move onto professional arbitrators and if all that failed, he was planning a full exorcism.

Matt thought that Wade was the only one reading real grimoires.

Wade kept asking him and Foggy if selkies had good luck charms, which was hard to answer.

They did, but not for human children. And the charms weren’t so much charms as protective spells that had to be performed over and over again over long periods of time. These spells were songs. Lullabies, mostly.

Wade asked how long they took to be effective.

“Eugh. Years?” Matt asked Foggy. “Mum sang over me for like, 12 years, anyways.”

“You could’ve used twice that,” Foggy snipped at him.

“It’s not my fault.”

“Twice, Murdock. That’s how much protection you need. From _yourself_.”

“Okay, it’s definitely my fault,” Matt said. “But yeah, a long time, Wade.”

Wade stared him down.

“Can you do it?” he asked.

He, nor Karen, got what was so fucking funny about that question.

“Matt cannot sing to save his life,” Foggy eventually told them.

“I can play, though,” Matt offered brightly.

Wade blinked.

“What the fuck kind of selkie are you, Red?” he demanded.

“I’m a human,” Matt told him, beaming. “ _Hu_ man.”

“Get out of my face. You’re a weird semi-water-dog at best.”

Wade found out that good luck could be grown from objects which were worn and weathered and enchanted with protection spells. He had a token which he was very attached to, which he claimed had saved his life.

He was determined that it would save Peter’s.

He put a hole in it and worked it onto Peter’s existing leather band along with the protection stone his mother had wrapped around him.

Peter frowned at it.

Johnny hissed at it.

Peter held his wrist back out to Wade.

“Johnny doesn’t like nickel,” he said. “Can you take it off please? I’ll put it in my room and keep it really safe, I promise.”

Wade was stuck. The point of this object was for Peter to wear it constantly. Johnny growled and radiated heat at the token over Peter’s shoulder. Peter moved his arm further and further out of his reach so that he couldn’t get his burning little mitts on it.

“Stop that, you’re gonna brand me,” Peter finally snapped at him. “Is that what you want?”

Johnny, to Foggy’s surprise, crumpled his face in and pulled back immediately.

“No,” he mumbled. “I don’t—I don’t wanna hurt you.”

“Well that’s what you’re gonna do. When I say stop, you stop. You can’t feel things, remember?” Peter said.

“I remember.”

“Listen to me.”

“I’m sorry.”

Peter huffed.

Foggy was fucking gobsmacked.

When he got home he grabbed Matt out of his pre-Daredevil nap and shook him until he fully understood what Foggy had just experienced.

“He…stopped?” Matt said.

“He stopped _and_ apologized,” Foggy emphasized.

“What the fuck?”

“Matt. Matt. _Matt._ Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

Matt frowned, then lit up.

“Oh shit,” he said.

“Right?”

“No. _No._ No?” Matt said.

“Think about Peter’s luck,” Foggy told him. “If he’s got no luck, then there’s no way he would have found a proper fire demon, he could have only run into—”

“A defective fire demon?” Matt finished.

There was a pause.

“We cannot let Wade separate them,” Matt said. “Those other guys’ll eat that kid alive.”

Wade did not appreciate the sudden interference. He made the very valid point that defective demon or no, the kid was still sharing Peter’s heart. That was not a good thing.

“Well, no,” Matt said, “ _But_ , a fire demon who can be brought under control could be a really good thing for Peter. Like, a really good thing. If they could work in tandem, then they would be a strong team, and anyways. We don’t actually know much about this demon. He might have good luck. If he’s got enough luck to balance out Peter, that he might actually be protecting Peter from a lot of the shit that would normally happen to him and trust me, Wade, the _fae_ are a lot stronger than a human-made amulet.”

Wade was not sold.

Wade still had a neatly organized strategy going on here.

“Maybe we just try to understand what purposes the demon offers Peter,” Matt said. “I mean, this is a kid who nearly gets taken out by cars on the daily. I can’t imagine that his luck could be worse.”

Wade was still not sold, but he assented because Matt was very insistent. He extracted a promise that he would be allowed to go back to his strategies if this experiment bore no fruit.

Matt agreed.

What they learned about Johnny over the next week or so was that Johnny was a weird fucking fire demon. Possibly the worst fucking fire demon, now that Foggy thought about it.

He showed much reluctance to burn buildings and he was very upset by smoke detectors.

This was emphatically not normal fire demon behavior. Especially the bit where he jolted, then hid behind Peter at the sound of a fire alarm.

Peter kept telling him that there was nothing to be afraid of, it was just a sound, but that didn’t stop his and Johnny’s shared heart from leaping and surging at the first screech, or so Matt claimed.

Johnny further proved over that week that he was quickly pacified with candles and chunks of wood put into his hands. He loved to hold candles. He liked to make their flames grow tall. He liked to make them dance. He was super into making charcoal and Peter had constructed a little fireplace for him for him in his room, which he made a nest of kindling in every evening before putting Johnny in his bubbly flaming ball form into it. Peter gave him a couple of logs to burn every night and Johnny collected the charcoal that remained in the morning into a cast-iron dutch oven Peter had found for this purpose.

May said, despite herself, that Johnny was a very good little fire.

He was happy to smoke food, but his favorite thing was baking bread. May had learned that if she gave him a smaller version of the cast-iron dutch oven that Peter had for him in his bedroom and she put yeasty things in it, Johnny would wrap himself around that bad boy and cuddle it for as long as he was able to. Sometimes, May and Peter just let him hold the oven.

“He’s amazing for compost,” May also offered.

This was strange.

Just absolutely bizarre.

“I know,” May told Foggy and Matt. “I did so much research when Pete came home with him. Everything said that Pete was going to be scorched from the inside out, but, well. Obviously that’s not happening. Do you think he’s, uh? Broken?”

Er.

 _Yeah_.

Big time.

“I’ve read about fire demons getting bigger and more powerful,” May continued. “I guess some societies used them as like, energy sources for steam-powered stuff. I don’t know if that would ever be something Johnny could do, since I think he needs a break from burning sometimes, but he and Pete are the same age, so I don’t know, he might grow, don’t you think?”

Foggy thought that Peter and Johnny’s non-flame time looked exactly like what he and his cousins used to do when they were all pups. They just piled on top of each other, nearly suffocating each other all the while.

Huh.

“Would you say he’s tame, though?” Matt asked. “Like, does he ever explode or try to start fires on his own?”

May shrugged.

“He hasn’t so far,” she said. “He accidently catches stuff with he gets excited, but beyond that, nothing intentional, from what I can tell.”

Ohoho.

They might have misjudged this one, Matt.

Matt winced but was forced to agree.

Johnny was a weird kid. Definitely a weird kid. But not outwardly malicious.

He and Peter kind of suited each other in that way.

Johnny didn’t want to talk about his background. He was content to glare and radiate Matt and Foggy’s way while Peter ignored him and worked on an art project for school. It looked like a collage and Peter’s focus was entirely on the tip of his X-acto knife and the hair of the woman he was meticulously cutting out of her magazine home.

“Siblings, child,” Matt repeated. “Do you have siblings?”

Johnny pressed his lips tight together.

Foggy cocked his head.

“No siblings?” he said. “That’s unusual. I heard baby fire demons are called embers.”

Matt choked on a laugh.

Johnny took supreme offense.

“It’s not funny,” he burst out before remembering that he wasn’t talking to these grumpy water folks.

“Are you still an ember?” Matt teased.

Johnny showed him his teeth. Matt missed the warning and Foggy ignored it.

“It’s cool if you are,” Matt said, then paused. “Or is it ‘hot if you are?’”

Foggy punched him. Johnny picked up the dutch oven under Peter’s desk and hugged it, grumbling. It took Foggy a moment to realize he was saying words. He noticed mostly because Peter looked up and said ‘really?’

Johnny huffed and mumbled and adjusted his oven in his arms.

“Why don’t you go home then?” Peter asked. “You can go, I won’t stop you.”

“Don’t wanna,” Johnny said.

“Go home?” Peter asked. “Why not? Is she mean?”

Johnny scowled.

“She’s busy with her _boyfriend_ ,” he said. “It’s all she cares about right now and she’d be mad if she found out.”

Peter pushed back his chair.

“Wait, she doesn’t know we’re bonded?” he asked.

Johnny mumbled harder than ever to the oven. He refused to meet Peter’s eye.

“Johnny, if she kills you, she kills me,” Peter groaned. “Go tell her. She’s your sister.”

“I don’t need no sisters,” Johnny huffed.

Awwww. Foggy felt bad for him. He had an insufferable sister, too. He caught himself before he said something stupid like, ‘you wanna talk about it?’ though.

“Go,” Peter said with narrow eyes. “You can come back when you’re done. If it goes badly, whatever. You’ll still come back here.”

Johnny paused and unfolded a little bit.

“You’d still have me back here?” he asked.

Peter scoffed.

“Duh,” he said. “Stop being weird. Go home and come back. That’s an order.”

Johnny followed it. He was gone in a flash and a flicker. Peter went back to his collage.

And promptly stabbed himself with his penknife.

It was now confirmed that baby ember Johnny was balancing out baby witch Peter’s non-existent luck. Whether Peter had known that in entering what all the older people were now realizing was a bargain made between two kids feeling ostracized at a particular moment was unclear. He seemed to think that Johnny was warm and friendly and nice to be with even if they weren’t talking. Johnny liked Peter because Peter was loyal to a fault and was always cold and thought he was funny and nice to have around.

In terms of bargain-making, they were the exact types of parties who were too young and immature to make that decision, but fuck. It had been made now, and even Wade felt bad about the idea of driving a knife between that friendship.

Peter’s friends didn’t like Johnny, though.

MJ hated him. MJ very vocal about how much she hated him. She kept asking Matt to go put him out.

Matt had started to offer her estimates for how much he’d need to compensated for this business. MJ always said she’d pay him in installments.

May knew what this was, however. She said the ire was coming from the uncomfortable realization between MJ and Ned that they were now sharing their buddy three ways instead of two. Johnny, on the other hand, thought Peter was his. The energy he was putting off in that area was creating even more friction between him and Peter’s older friends.

Peter didn’t appear to have an opinion on any of this.

“They’re all my friends,” he allegedly told Wade while setting punches right into the center of his palms. “I like ‘em all the same.”

Matt, ever the gossip, thought that this was exactly the problem. He was of the opinion that MJ had special kinds of feelings for Peter and Johnny had special kinds of feelings for Peter and while Peter was blessedly, adorably oblivious, those other two were reading each other like the books they were.

Matt liked to tuck himself into his knees and snicker when he thought of this stuff and his giggling was infectious, especially when it came out of nowhere and in inappropriate settings.

Against his better judgement (and Sister Maggie’s absolute horror when she found out that this arrangement was happening and here to stay), Foggy decided to allow Johnny to come into their fold. He told Matt to be nice. He told Karen to tell him if either he or Matt started to get weird and growly without their notice.

And when Johnny could finally hold a manila envelope without turning it into instant-soot, he was allowed to come with Peter to the office.

MJ hated that, of course, but Foggy was hoping to lead by example here.

Matt had other ideas for taming this behavior and decided that performing his fish-scale trick for MJ would take her mind off things and give her some new problems to wrestle with.

He was not wrong.

Foggy would give him that much. He definitely was not wrong.


End file.
